That was one of a number of works that would be hard to label, strictly speaking, as photography. In some, multiple photos had been mashed up into one. In others, words and images had been added. Colors had been changed. They had, in a way, been painted, not with brushes but with technology.

Some self-defined iPhoneographers reeled off the names — Snapseed, PicTapGo, VSCO Cam, Blender — of the apps they had used to tweak images by playing with exposure, color, focus and layering.

Kevturner007, who as Kevin Turner works in construction, said he had used a digital camera but took 400 separate photographs to get his painterly image of a saguaro cactus in the Sonoran Desert at night, starry sky transformed into streaks of white light.

Kchensays, a.k.a. Cal State Fullerton marketing student Kevin Chen, said he wakes up each morning dreaming of photography. For his work on the wall, he'd combined a photo of giraffes he'd taken in Zimbabwe with another of clouds he'd captured over Chino Hills.

Lots of people had seen the result. More than 1,600 had clicked to "like" it on Instagram.

But online approval is one thing. Experiencing it in person is another.

For the four hours of the show, Chen and his fellow artists sipped wine and soaked up the scene, watching people examine their work.

That made them proud, and so they held up their iPhones, perhaps to prove to themselves later — as they went about their everyday lives — that what they had experienced had been real.